London, Chatham and Dover Railway The station was proposed by the
London, Chatham and Dover Railway (LC&DR), who had been given parliamentary power to build a line into the City of London. The company wanted to compete with rivals, the
South Eastern Railway, and provide the best service into Central London. The line was complete as far as the Thames by 1864; the LC&DR opened
Blackfriars Bridge station on 1 June, which sat on the south bank adjacent to Blackfriars Road. The station was constructed on two levels, with a goods depot at street level and passenger facilities level with the bridge. An underground station at Blackfriars north of the river was opened by the
Metropolitan District Railway in 1870, before any mainline stations. The railway bridge across the Thames was delayed because the City's municipal body, the
Corporation of London, was unsure as to what it should look like and how many arches there should be. The station was designed by
Joseph Cubitt and had a long roof with walls that stretched up to the riverbank. Cubitt subsequently designed the original bridge, which carried four tracks on a lattice girder bridge, supported by sets of stone piers supporting iron columns. Services began across the bridge on 21 December 1864. Upon completion, trains ended at a temporary terminal, replaced by on 1 June 1865. A further station, , opened on 2 March 1874 and the LC&DR line ran via the
Snow Hill tunnel to a connection to the
Metropolitan Railway near , then on to
King's Cross and stations. The mainline Blackfriars station was opened by the LC&DR as '''St. Paul's railway station''' on 10 May 1886 when the company opened the
St. Paul's Railway Bridge across the Thames. The new bridge and station were built as a supplement to, rather than a replacement for, the first bridge because of increasing railway traffic. The joint engineers for the works were William Mills of the London, Chatham, and Dover Company, and Messrs.
John Wolfe Barry and
Henry Marc Brunel.
Edward Cruttwell was the resident engineer in charge of construction. The signals were not fully restored until 11 August 1946, after the war. After the creation of
British Railways in 1948, the station was managed by the
Southern Region. Gradually, the structure of the original Blackfriars Railway Bridge deteriorated until it was unsound. In 1961, two tracks were removed from the bridge to ease its load. The station had little investment and still supported some of the original architecture and design up to the 1960s. By this time, services were reduced to a handful of commuter services. The original Blackfriars Bridge station, which had remained as a goods depot, was demolished in 1964. The bridge was closed to trains on 27 June 1971 and the deck was removed in 1985, and only the piers in the river and the orange bridge abutments remain. The station began to be rebuilt along with the Underground station in 1971, which included an additional of office space. Reconstruction was problematic, as the original station building had sat on top of a
cold store, which had frozen the ground below it. The District line tunnel had to be removed and replaced with a new supporting structure that could accommodate the redesigned station building. The work was formally reopened on 30 November 1977 by the
Lord Mayor of London,
Peter Vanneck (though the station had never actually closed). A part of the stonework elevation from the 1886 LC&DR station has been preserved at platform level in the main line station indicating many destinations in the south-east of England and in Europe.
Station rebuild Blackfriars station was significantly renovated between 2009 and 2012 in a £500 million redevelopment programme to modernise the station and increase capacity. The office building above the station was demolished and replaced as part of the Thameslink programme. The new station is the same height and has a combined National Rail and London Underground ticket hall and ventilation shaft together with escalators and lifts between a mezzanine level for main line railway services and the sub-surface level for London Underground services. The Underground station also received major enhancements, with a new roof of glazed north lights and partial-height glazed side panels installed along the entire length of the bridge. On the south bank of the river a new station entrance was built at
Bankside, containing a second ticket hall. The through platforms were moved to the east side and extended along Blackfriars Railway Bridge to accommodate 12-carriage trains (in place of the previous eight). The layout has been altered by building new bay platforms on the west side, avoiding the need for through trains between City Thameslink and London Bridge crossing the paths of terminating ones. The works exploited the disused piers west of the existing railway bridge which once supported the former West Blackfriars and St. Paul's Railway Bridge. The easternmost row of disused piers was strengthened, tied into the existing bridge and clad in stone. The longer platforms allow longer trains on the Thameslink route to pass through London. The Thameslink redevelopment work at Blackfriars has been well received. In 2017, the station won a Major Station of the Year award at the National Rail Awards. == Accidents ==